1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to anticancer agents, and particularly to an N-arylmethylidene piperidone tethered dispiropyrrolidine which induces apoptosis in blood cancer cells.
2. Description of the Related Art
Chemotherapy is a category of cancer treatment that uses chemical substances, especially one or more anti-cancer drugs (chemotherapeutic agents), that are given as part of a standardized chemotherapy regimen. Traditional chemotherapeutic agents are cytotoxic; i.e., they act by killing cells that divide rapidly, one of the main properties of most cancer cells. This means that chemotherapy also harms cells that divide rapidly under normal circumstances, such as the cells in the patient's bone marrow, digestive tract and hair follicles. This results in the most common side-effects of chemotherapy, namely, myelosuppression (i.e., decreased production of blood cells, hence also immunosuppression), mucositis (i.e., inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract), and alopecia (i.e., hair loss).
Some newer anticancer drugs (for example, various monoclonal antibodies) are not indiscriminately cytotoxic, but rather target proteins that are abnormally expressed in cancer cells and that are essential for their growth. Such treatments are often referred to as targeted therapy (as distinct from classic chemotherapy) and are often used alongside traditional chemotherapeutic agents in antineoplastic treatment regimens. There is a great deal of interest in targeted cancer treatments which induce apoptosis in targeted cancer cells.
Apoptosis, autophagy and necro-apoptosis are different kinds of programmed cell death (PCD) and a physiological mechanism by which cells with irreparably damaged DNA are removed without any inflammatory response. A growing body of evidence suggests that more than twenty different pathways contribute to different modes of cell death in tumor cells. Particularly, death domain receptors, DNA damage and repair, extracellular apoptotic signals, pro-apoptotic genes, anti-apoptotic, positive and negative apoptotic regulatory genes, death domain receptors and caspases and regulators are functional pathways involved, and play a key role in tumor pathophysiology.
In the pathway towards the induction of cancer, evading specific PCD (i.e., apoptosis) is one of the fundamental mechanisms. The direct molecular link between cancer pathogenesis and dysregulation of PCD are interlinked mechanisms that can be used as therapeutic targets by triggering PCD mechanisms (i.e., induced apoptosis) in tumor/cancer cells. Thus, screening by induction of apoptosis has potential application in target-based cancer therapy, which is one of the desired endpoints in cancer therapy. It would be desirable to be able to easily and effectively produce targeted PCD compounds for destroying desired cancer cells without causing damage to healthy cells in the patient. Thus, anti-cancer compounds solving the aforementioned problems are desired.